Friday, April 11, 2014

Overreach and Western Siberia

At last I finished this map:

At the centre bottom of the map the reader can pick out the town of Sibir, which is the original name for the present city of Omsk, just north of the Kazakhstan border ... that border would run along the bottom of this map, or thereabouts. The real Sibir was actually further west and north, near the town of Boloine Ob (Tobolsk) that appears on the right side of the last map I posted, the Ural map. The Russians, however, destroyed that city in 1582 ... and none of this works for the history of my world, since there are no Russians in this part of the world, the Russians never took over, there are orcs and goblins and hobgoblins here, etc. I wanted a 'Sibir' however, so in renaming many of the Russian cities to give them an 'orc' flavour, I renamed Omsk and so it goes.

At the bottom right there's another large city called Zosk-Sibir; this is actually the correct location for Novosibirsk, which really only means 'New Sibir" anyway. 'Zosk,' then, is colloquial orc-speak for 'New' ... and it all comes together somehow. Plus I get to retain the justification for calling all of this vast area 'Siberia.' Which is nice.

For those who do not know their history, Novosibirsk is where the Russians moved the center of their munitions production in the Second World War ... and it has taken me three maps to get this far east. For fun, I thought I would put all three maps together, what with Moscow being at the far west of all three, and Novosibirsk being at the far east:

I've slightly cut off Zosk-Sibir on the right, but its clear where it is. The above is the distance in 20 mile hexes - through the hills east of Moscow, then the Urals, then the swamplands of western Sibir - that the Germans would have needed to traverse to finally destroy the Russian war machine, which was supported by America and also by the furnaces of the Kuznetsk and Minusinsk coal and iron basins even further east.